WORD spreads quickly through Mogadishu’s rabbit warren of dusty alleyways and bullet-ridden streets.

Among the clans who live in the bombed-out buildings, lean-to shacks and festering squatter camps of the lawless Somali capital, lorded over by young militias, there are as few secrets as there are amenities.

Messages, often bloody, are swiftly delivered. They are rarely misunderstood by the long-suffering population. After 14 years of anarchy, Somalis have learnt that survival depends on guessing what is likely to happen next.

Yesterday was no exception. Just as a team of African Union (AU) officials was leaving the ramshackle building that serves as one of the city’s two main hotels, a bomb exploded. Two passers-by were killed and six were injured.

“I assume the bomb was targeting the AU mission. We shall investigate,” Abdullahi Ganey, the so-called governor, said. He cannot visit many areas of the Indian Ocean port city.

The ruined, once-beautiful Italianate Somali capital is a patchwork of fiefdoms, controlled by warlords, Mafiosi-style thugs and, most recently, al-Qaeda-linked groups. An area that is safe one day can be out of bounds the next.

The AU officials, scouting the capital for a peace mission, were unhurt, but they will not hurry back. Neither will the new Government, chosen after two years of negotiations in neighbouring Kenya, which the planned AU mission is meant to support. A spokesman for President Abdullahi Yusuf, whose incoming Government is the thirteenth attempt since 1991 to create a central authority, said plans to return to the capital next Monday had been put on hold. “It is delayed, that is all,” he said.

The jihadists who grew out of an al-Qaeda-linked organisation called al-Ittihad al-Islamiya, have made it clear that they do not want the new President or his Government anywhere near the capital.

They have also given warning that if troops from other African countries “invade” Somalia to support him, then the streets will run with blood. It appears to be no idle threat: a few weeks ago a delegation of MPs from the new Parliament came under attack when they tried to visit the main port, once its lifeline to the outside world where dhows and container vessels unloaded their cargoes.

The AU officials escaped serious injury only because the hotel owner, suspecting trouble, had sent the vehicle they had used the day before on a dummy run while he arranged for his guests to take another along a back road to a dirt-strip airfield.

He had reason to fear trouble. Last week Kate Peyton, a BBC producer, was shot outside the Sahafi Hotel. She died in hospital.

Somalia’s chaos began in 1991 with the overthrow of President Mohamed Siad Barre, a Cold War puppet dictator. Former allies fell upon one another and carved up the country along complex, clan-based lines. A devastating man-made famine followed, while the skilled and wealthy deserted the country.

Today battle-wagons full of gun-toting young militias, high on drugs, scream across the city, testing the limits of their bosses’ territory, exchanging greetings and booty with rival gangs. They often kill one another and innocent bystanders as small disputes degenerate into small battles.

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